THE BLOODY CHAMBER: AND OTHER STORIES

London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1979. First edition. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. (30394). Octavo, boards. Ten fantasies including "The Company of Wolves," (filmed in 1984 by Neil Jordan). "The Bloody Chamber is often wrongly described as a group of traditional fairy tales given a subversive feminist twist. In fact, these are new stories, not re-tellings. As Angela Carter made clear, "My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories." She knew from the start that she was drawn to "Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious". "The Bloody Chamber is like a multifaceted glittering diamond reflecting and refracting a variety of portraits of desire and sexuality - heterosexual female sexuality - which, unusually for the time, 1979, are told from a heterosexual female viewpoint." "The stories in The Bloody Chamber reverberate with deep and unmistakable imaginative pleasure. There is an astonishing extravivid materiality to this alternative world she invented..." - New review by Helen Simpson in The Guardian, 24 June, 2006. Barron (ed.) Fantasy Literature 4A-63. See Barron (ed), Fantasy and Horror (1999) 6-81.